[gst-devel] Gstreamer + memory usage

Daniel James Laird daniel.j.laird at nxp.com
Mon Mar 9 18:17:37 CET 2009


All,

I am new to Gstreamer but have been impressed at the ease with which I got it running on my embedded platform.  I now have A/V decode running on my embedded decoders and using GStreamers input-selectors/queues and demux+filesrc etc to make this happen.

However, the system I am developing on has < 64 mb RAM.  Once the system starts up and runs I am left with 20MB odd for applications.
Once I start up Gstreamer it really seems to eat memory with it using nearly all the 18-20MB to run.

Some of this is due to my A/V queue lengths.  
But a lot of it seems to be untraceable.

My questions are:
1. Any hints on tracking where memory has gone.
2. Does Gstreamer have a memory manager where I could limit what it can use (much like Java allows) so that I could say heres 10MB no more
3. Is anyone else running on embedded systems finding similar issues?

I suspect I am missing some options, my design choices might be floored or many other reasons so I really would appreciate any hints or tips for this. In the mean time calling free and checking calls to malloc (g_malloc) seems the only way forward

Many thanks
Daniel Laird




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